In the latest development to Amazon’s RTO saga, the tech giant sent an email Wednesday scolding employees for not adhering to a new policy mandating they come into the office at least three days a week.
“We now have three months under our belt with a lot more people back in the office, and you can feel the surge in energy and collaboration happening among Amazonians and across teams,” the email reads. “We are reaching out as you are not currently meeting our expectation of joining your colleagues in the office at least three days a week, even though your assigned building is ready. We expect you to start coming into the office three or more days a week now.”
The only problem: Some of the employees who received the email say they’ve been coming in as requested, Insider first reported.
An Amazon spokesperson confirmed the email to Fortune, attributing the error to an oversight. But the email itself nonetheless underscores the tumult that has characterized Amazon’s efforts to get its employees back at their office desks. The increasingly stricter measures to return to the office are a stark change from when Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said “we don’t have a plan to require people to come back” at a conference back in September 2022, although he added that the company would “proceed adaptively” as it studied the best solution for its workforce in the future. About five months later, Jassy issued a company-wide communication outlining a new policy that would see employees come to the office three days a week—even if it meant that some remote workers would have to move to cities where the company has offices.
Another senior Amazon executive echoed Jassy’s sentiments earlier this month. “It’s time to disagree and commit,” Mike Hopkins, senior vice president of Prime Video and Amazon Studios, reportedly said during a meeting. “We’re here, we’re back—it’s working. I don’t have data to back it up, but I know it’s better.” The last part is an unusual sentiment at Amazon, where managers reportedly hang signs with the idiom “In God we trust, all others must bring data,” which was made popular by the statistician W. Edward Demmings, who developed the sampling techniques used by the Census Bureau.
While Hopkins may not have had the relevant data at his fingertips, a working paper published in July from WFH Research shows fully remote workers are 10% to 20% less productive than those who work fully in-person. Higher productivity in the office is what many bosses have been touting over the last couple of years as the key reason why workers should get back to their desks, including Jassy himself. In his April shareholder letter, he wrote that “many of the best Amazon inventions have had their breakthrough moments” in the office.
Yet remote-work evangelists would point to data that suggests otherwise. A survey from last October found employees with full control over their schedules were 29% more productive than employees with no flexibility. In a cruel twist of fate, the research in question was conducted by Slack’s Future Forum, a think tank dedicated to studying remote work that was eliminated right as parent company Salesforce began implementing its own return-to-office policy.
This productivity gap has created a return-to-office battle in the workplace. Tensions between the Amazon brass and employees reached a fever pitch earlier this spring. In May, employees staged a walkout to protest return-to-office policies that were implemented at the start of the month. Another 20,000 employees also signed a petition expressing their disapproval of the company’s return-to-office policies.
Amazon is hardly the only company that’s had to deal with disgruntled employees when implementing its return-to-office policies. Google also had a raft of employee complaints when it notified them that attendance would be monitored going forward. Elon Musk’s Tesla was among the first major companies to require employees to return to the office full-time when it did so back in May of 2022. And one of the most recent and ironic return-to-office mandates happened earlier this week when Zoom ordered its employees back to the office two days a week.
Tech companies aren’t the only avid supporters of in-person work. Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon has, like Musk, long voiced his preference that the whole company come into the office. He’s since been joined by JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon in issuing orders for full returns to the office. Yet, a recent survey of finance executives by consulting firm Deloitte found that two-thirds would quit if they were forced to come to the office five days a week—it’s clear disgruntled employees wanting to hang on to their newfound flexibility are everywhere.
Amazon, for its part, seems to have made peace with the reality that its RTO mandate may lead to some turnover. When the company asked remote employees to relocate to be close enough to come into the office for three days, it also informed them that those who didn’t do so would be considered to have voluntarily resigned their position.
